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The Effects Of The Internet On American Community

Well, the jury is still out on the effects of the Internet on American
community. I thought the following clips from Putnam frame well the
challenges that face those who wish to enhance social capital through
the use of computer technology.

The absence of any correlation between Internet usage and civic
engagement could mean that the Internet attracts reclusive nerds and
energizes them, but it could also mean that the Net
disproportionately attracts civic dynamos and sedates them. In any
event, it is much too early to assess the long-run social effects of
the Internet empirically… neither the apocalyptic “gloom and doom”
prognosticators nor utopian “brave new virtual community” advocates
are probably on target. \
\
-- Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of
American Community, p. 171

Some of the allegedly greater democracy in cyberspace is based more
on hope and hype than on careful research. The political culture of
the Internet, at least in its early stages, is astringently
libertarian, and in some respects cyberspace represents a Hobbesian
state of nature, not a Lockean one. As Peter Kollock and Marc
Smith, two of the more thoughtful observers of community on the
Internet, observe, “It is widely believed and hoped that the ease of
communicating and interacting online will lead to a flourishing of
democratic institutions, heralding a new and vital arena of public
discourse. But to date most online groups have the structure of
either an anarchy [if unmoderated] or a dictatorship [if
moderated].” \
\
-- Ibid., p. 173

In a particularly striking parallel to the use of the telephone, a
careful study by sociologist Barry Wellman and his colleagues of the
use of computer-mediated communication by research scholars found
that

Although the internet helps scholars to maintain ties over great
distances, physical proximity still maters. Those scholars who
see each other often or work nearer to each other email each other
more often. Frequent contact on the Internet is a complement to
frequent face-to-face contact, not a substitute for it.